The Stranger

Lo straniero

Press & Industry screenings and events are only for accredited passes.

Please note that only items from our Quiet Snacks menu may be consumed during this screening. This menu has been selected to ensure our audiences' experience is not disrupted. TIFF is committed to providing the best film-going environment possible for all audience members.

See it now or see it never: the rarest of Visconti's films (this is only its fourth screening in Toronto in two decades), The Stranger is also the most faithful of the director's many literary adaptations, as Visconti — who typically refashioned novels to reflect his own concerns and obsessions — seemed awed enough by Albert Camus' celebrated novel to follow it steadfastly. Marcello Mastroianni plays Camus' protagonist Meursault, a French Algerian whose progressive detachment from the conventional codes of social behaviour becomes damning evidence against him when he is put on trial for murder; Anna Karina, fresh off her final film with Jean-Luc Godard, co-stars as Meursault's lover Marie. "The movie has great passages and is highly effective in suggesting the atmosphere of the novel — the Algerian heat, the sudden, unpremeditated violence" (Pauline Kael); "Visconti's best film since Rocco and, further back, La Terra Trema.... At times I had the sensation of seeing an early Godard movie as it might have been directed by Renoir in his prime" (Raymond Durgnat).